Matter of life and death

Someday I'll be a weather-beaten skull resting on a grass pillow,
Serenaded by a stray bird or two.
Kings and commoners end up the same,
No more enduring than last night's dream.

I am pretty sure death is not something you think about everyday(even butterflies don't', but that's different)Neither I want you to, but it surely deserves to be peeped in once  in a while. Its can very simply be put in the words of Leonardo da Vinci “As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well used brings happy death”. Now whether it is “happy” or not depends on lot of things. But if you look it from a different angle, everyone is immortal in his reference as he  may know that he is going to die, but he can never know that he is in fact dead.

Anyway, there is so much suffering (read dying) around that does it really matter which one of them is death?  If you really look inside people, they don’t fear death but the fear of its strike. The moment is what they try to defy, everything after that is incognito.

There is certainly a life after death (No! I am not talking about mummies). Albert Einstein professed that our death is not an end if we can live on in our children and the younger generation.  For they are us, our bodies are only wilted leaves on the tree of life.  There are three facets to this whole phenomenon. The first is obviously the historic one where Egyptians believed that people live a second life after death and they mummified bodies and kept belongings the deceased might need later. The second one is religious where people believe in the concept of “Moksha” and the theory of heaven and hell which we undergo depending on our “Karma” while we were alive. The third and the most practical facet is..well lets put it this way, do you think Mahatma Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln  or for that matter Einstein really dead? No they are not, they will live till eternity because of the unparalleled impact they have on us.

So you see, death may be the greatest of all human blessings because it’s the only way to live forever. You can be, after death, what you can never be when you are alive. In the cycle of pouring life into death and death into life without a drop being spilled, lays the salient truth that we control what will happen after we die and instead of fearing the same we can build the path after the dead-end.

I knew a man who once said, "Death smiles at us all; all a man can do is smile back."  -From the movie Gladiator